We pay to watch films. We want to understand the story and relate to the characters. Ads, by contrast, are watched unwillingly—not only with an abject lack of interest, but with significant motivation to ignore the message.

There are two Cannes festivals: one for film, and one for advertising. The industry would do well to remember that.

So when the industry refers to ads as “films,” it’s a marketing misnomer of grand proportions: not just inappropriate but directionally false. And it’s far from the only one.

Ad breaks: These are not breaks for ads—they are breaks from them. The TV industry’s own behavioural data shows more than half of in-room viewers disengage entirely during commercial breaks. Yet media buyers price reach against an exposure that, for the majority of impressions, never actually happens. We value a room with two adults in it more highly than with one, even though the research shows a lone viewer is more than twice as likely to watch the ads.

Storytelling: Most modern advertising is structurally incapable of telling a story. A 6-second bumper has a logo and a prayer. Calling that “storytelling” is creative cowardice dressed up as craft.

Activation: Whether it’s a tent at SXSW, a sampling stall in Westfield, or a TikTok stunt, most don’t move consumers. First, “activation” lets a team confuse doing a thing with achieving a thing. Second, it eats brand budget to the tune of six figures of media money being spent on canapés and an Instagram influencer.

Engagement: The metric of choice for the strategically lost. A Like is not engagement. A comment is not engagement. A share, in most cases, is not engagement. In essence “engagement” does not actually mean engagement. The misnomer has redirected an entire generation of marketing investment toward the 0.5% of category buyers who interact with brand content—usually because their hand slipped—while the 99.5% who actually drive sales go un-served.

Brand loyalty: The oldest lie in marketing. The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute has spent 40 years demonstrating that loyalty—in the sense of exclusive, committed, repeat purchase—is fictional. Category buying is a polygamous, stochastic, wobbly thing driven by mental and physical availability, not anthropomorphic devotion.

Brand love: The phrase implies an emotional bond between human and brand that no behavioural dataset has ever supported at any meaningful scale. Yes, we all have one or two brands we actually love. But the other 2,984 in our current repertoire don’t make our heart skip even a little beat. The job isn’t to be cherished—it’s to come to mind at the moment of purchase. Less romantic. Far more profitable.

Insight: They exist. But a genuine insight—a non-obvious observation about consumer behaviour that, acted upon, unlocks enormous growth—is a career exception, not a process; 99% of what gets stamped “insight” meets none of that definition. “Moms are busy.” “Gen Z values authenticity.” “People want convenience.” These are not insights. They aren’t even accurate. They are observations a moderately attentive 12-year-old could supply while playing a video game.

Full funnel: Advertising’s core concept is bandied around in a shotgun manner to suggest that A. we extract the whole customer journey, and B. get a firehose out and soak that puppy from top to bottom. That’s not what it should mean. It’s crucial to take in the full funnel during any initial diagnosis. But then you activate data and strategic thinking to work out where you want to apply resources to unlock growth.

Disruption: Clayton Christensen’s theory was a precise, narrow account of how low-end entrants displace incumbents: It’s usually slow and initially ignored by incumbents who don’t see the threat. Yet the word now means literally anything. Every Series A deck describes a disruption play. Every challenger brand pitches itself as disruptive when it is, in fact, a slightly cheaper version of an existing thing. Real disruption—rare, hard, terrifying—gets buried under the marketing copy of a marginally cheaper razor delivered by mail.

Consumer: We call them that because consumption is the only part of their lives we are interested in. But consumption is, for almost every human alive, the least interesting thing they do. A “consumer portrait” is likely to be 900 words on what they think, feel, hope, and want from a brand’s product—which should be one sentence. The remaining 875 words should be about a human: their job, kids, fears, Saturday mornings. If we saw them as human first, ironically, we’d understand them better as consumers second.

And we’d make work that actually moves them.